Black hole at the dawn of time challenges our understanding of how the universe was formed

The most dominant scientific theory of recent years describes that point as the Big Bang — a spontaneous eruption of reality as we know it out of a quantum singularity.

And the existence of early black holes has been predicted to be a key telltale as to whether or not the idea may be valid.

“Gathering all this mass in fewer than 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth,” says the astronomer who discovered it, Carnegie Institution for Science researcher Eduardo Bañados.

Is it evidence of a Big Bounce, where black holes from a universe from beyond our dawn of time somehow survived the contraction and recoil that produced the one we live in?